LJ Interviews Larry Augustin

I did an interview with Larry Augustin, founder and President of VA Research, by e-mail on August 19, 1997.

VA Research was founded in 1993 to
develop affordable workstation, server and Internet products using
the Linux operating system. I did an interview with Larry Augustin,
their founder and President, by e-mail on August 19, 1997.

Marjorie: Tell us how you
first became interested in Linux.

Larry: It was during the
time that I was a Ph.D. student at Stanford University in the
summer of 1993. I did a fair amount of system administration work
in our lab. I was also consulting and doing system administration
at Fintronic USA, an ECAD software company. At the same time Linux
was beginning to come into its own. By that I mean, the essentials
such as X and NFS were supported. The Linux environment was pretty
close to our primary development platform, Sun OS 4.1.3; so, we
decided it was time to replace Sun with Linux. I set up a 66MHz 486
machine running Linux for around $2000 and ported my thesis (15,000
lines of C/C++ code and 300 pages of LaTeX) as the first test case.
Even though my code was very Sun dependent, it took me less than a
day to port it to Linux. Compared to the SPARCstation 2 machines we
had ($7000 base price), the 486 running Linux ran my code 1.5 to 2
times faster. I was sold. By the way, we still use that first 486
at VA Research in Receiving.

Marjorie: Since you come
from the West Coast which is traditional BSD and Sun OS territory,
what factors made you decide to choose Linux over BSD?

Larry: Actually, my first
exposure to Unix was System V Release 3 at AT&T Bell Labs. I
spent two years there, beginning in 1984. So some of the System V
leanings of Linux appealed to me. One thing I liked about Linux was
the way it combined the best of System V and BSD. For example, I
liked the combination of System V run levels with BSD-style
rc scripts used in SLS and later
Slackware. I also tried FreeBSD on that same machine that first ran
Linux. FreeBSD was extremely appealing because I was so familiar
with Sun OS. At the same time, FreeBSD was missing important
features like shared libraries, and it didn't have the user base or
the developer base of Linux. It was also slower than Linux. The
trend was all Linux, and I didn't see BSD catching up.

Marjorie: What made you
decide to go into the Linux business?

Larry: James Vera, another
Ph.D. student at Stanford, looked at the Linux machines we had put
together and compared them to the SPARCstation we were using. They
were 1.5 to 2 times faster, cost one-third as much, had more
software and also ran DOS/Windows. We showed them off and people
said, “Can you put one together for me?” Graduate students can
always use more money and another excuse not to work on their
thesis, so we decided to put together systems for people on
weekends. The original idea was to gather all the components in my
apartment and have an assembly party. The concept was simple, but
it turned out to be a lot more complicated. As one of the venture
capital people we talked to later put it, “the proverbial lemonade
stand”.

The 1993 equivalent of the lemonade stand was the web page,
which we ran out of Fintronic, where I did consulting work. Those
first web pages were really ugly, but they contained a lot of
information that appealed to people. We'd done our homework:
benchmarked different configurations, tested different video cards,
etc. We thought we had a pretty nice machine for the money.

Marjorie: Sounds as if you
almost went into the web business rather than the Linux
business.

Larry: We didn't necessarily
plan to build a business around Linux workstations when we started
our “lemonade stand”. It was originally a part-time business.
We'd been doing it about six months and business was getting to be
more than we could handle. During that time, two other friends of
mine from Stanford, David Filo and Jerry Yang, were having the same
problem with a little web site they had developed called Yahoo.
James and I were working full time on Linux, and Dave and Jerry
were working full time putting URLs into Yahoo. Not a lot of work
was getting done at Stanford.

Dave, Jerry, James, myself and another friend, David Ku,
began writing business plans for Internet-based businesses. We
wrote a couple of business plans together, but none of them really
clicked. We were each being pulled into the separate directions we
had already taken. Dave and Jerry ended up with Yahoo going public
and making $150 million each. Now I tell people that my claim to
fame was writing a business plan with Jerry Yang and David Filo and
turning down $150 million to work on Linux.

Marjorie: When did you make
your first sale?

Larry: It was in November
1993. It wasn't a complete disaster, but we did learn that being in
the hardware business is not easy. Lots of things went wrong.
First, we were using the Orchid Fahrenheit video cards based on the
S3-028 chip set. The cards we received for that first order came
with a different BIOS revision than the cards we had tested and
didn't work with X, and the multi-I/O cards we had tested were out
of stock. We eventually got things worked out, but it was not as
easy as we had thought it would be.

The process we followed with all our components was fairly
straightforward. We'd get samples of 3 or 4 of the best-looking
products in a category based on our experience and comments on the
Internet. Then, we would test and benchmark them and use the best
ones. But it's not always that easy. First, manufacturers are
always doing product revisions like the BIOS change. When you're
doing only a few parts a month, it's really hard to get the same
revision of anything. Manufacturers also change revisions and don't
tell you. We had that problem again recently with Matrox. The
Matrox Millennium used to work in 24-bit color mode with XFree86,
then Matrox did a BIOS upgrade. So, we had to get the information
on the new BIOS back to the XFree86 core team.

We also discovered there is a lot of bad cache and RAM out
there. We now qualify each brand of SIMM or DIMM down to the
specific chips used with each motherboard. We used to think you
could buy any quality brand memory and expect it to work with any
quality brand motherboard—that's not true. We now use only memory
qualified with each board.

In general, for a given manufacturer, quality differs by
manufacturing lot. For example, we'd have a disc drive that looked
okay, and then receive a batch with 50% failure rates.

We ended up developing a whole set of checklists and test
procedures for every system. Benchmarking each system is also
important since some errors only show up as performance problems.
Things have also gotten easier, as we have grown. We can now
qualify batches of 50 and 100 components all from the same
manufacturing lot. That helps somewhat, but one thing we have
learned is that there's a lot more junk out there than we
thought.

Marjorie: What do you think
are the key barriers to acceptance of Linux in the corporate
world?

Larry: First, I think that
by “acceptance” we mean acceptance by corporate MIS departments.
Most of the Fortune 500 already use Linux but corporate MIS doesn't
know it. The feedback we get from the traditional magazines like
UNIX REVIEW, which are primarily Fortune 500,
is that Linux is well established among their subscribers. Usually,
it's because a developer or system administrator snuck a machine
past the corporate people. Eventually, the MIS people discover the
machine because some application is costing less and running
better. This strategy of sneaking it in the back door seems pretty
common.

For example, a good story I heard recently was from Cisco.
Cisco has 10,000 people and 1600 printers worldwide. Two years ago
they had a horrible management problem with printers. They could
never tell what was happening with a networked printer, since
hundreds of people on dozens of systems could all spool jobs to
that printer. The system administrator responsible for printers
began designing a scheme where all print jobs for a given printer
went through one spooling machine. The spooling machines needed to
be able to talk to all kinds of clients (Windows, NT, Unix, Novell,
etc.); they needed to be inexpensive enough that they could deploy
hundreds of them; they needed to be reliable; and they needed to be
remotely administered. Now all of those 10,000 people around the
world can print to any one of those 1600 printers anywhere else in
the world, and all those print jobs are spooled through Linux
machines.

Marjorie: Continuing that
same subject, what are the barriers to corporate MIS?

Larry: Support is a big one.
Corporate MIS wants someone to take responsibility. We all know
Linux has incredible support through the Internet, but that's not
the same as having someone's name on a legal document guaranteeing
support. That's where the commercial Linux vendors like Caldera,
Red Hat and VA Research come in—the MIS people need to see a large
stable company that will be there to back them up.

Applications is another big one. Ninety-five percent of the
corporate world doesn't care what OS the desktop runs, but whatever
OS it is, they want it to run the latest version of Microsoft
Office. You can see the power of Microsoft Office in the recent
deal Apple struck with Microsoft.

Perception is one of the barriers I don't think people give
enough weight to. The corporate world has to perceive Linux as
friendly to corporate MIS people. The perception that Linux is for
hackers only has to change. People in the Linux world need to
project a courteous and professional image.

Marjorie: How does VA
Research support the Linux community?

Larry: First, we host the
Silicon Valley Linux Users Group (SVLUG) and the Debian project on
machines at VA. That means we provide them with machines and
network access. We also sponsor SVLUG in other ways, such as
providing space for install fests and workshops. Usually, you'll
find a couple of VA people at the install fests helping out.

Also, we maintain a fairly complete FAQ and related support
information on our tech support web pages. These are available to
anyone, not just our customers.